The reader who approaches Descartes's first work ?Cartesianly,? that is, epistemologically, is faced with an insurmountable difficulty: the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii is virtually incomprehensible in Cartesian terms. Indeed, Descartes himself appears to have disowned the work, after having put it aside, never to be completed. In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1975 to accompany an Index to the Regulae published in 1976 and a new French translation published in 1977, Jean-Luc Marion argues that the key to understanding the text ? and the genesis of Cartesianism ? is to read it as a dialogue with Aristotle. Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind becomes intelligible when the precise correspondence between its themes and various Aristotelian texts concerning science and being is established.By situating Descartes within the history of the discourse on being, Marion brings into relief the grey ontology that lies at the origins of Cartesian science. Grey because it is never made explicit; grey because its ?objects? are the impoverished shadows of Aristotelian ?things?; grey because it never takes the full measure of itself. Within this history, then, the Regulae inaugurates a new era, where Descartes's own metaphysics and his conception of the divine become profoundly ambivalent.In revealing the origins and presuppositions of Cartesian science, Descartes's Grey Ontology reveals us ? we moderns ? to ourselves. At the same time, it is an introduction to contemporary Cartesian scholarship in France, revitalized since its publication, and it is an introduction to the thought of one of France's premier philosophers, whose oeuvre brings together the history of philosophy, phenomenology, and theology. A number of Marion's works have already been translated into English, many of them billed as an introduction to his thought. But this work of Cartesian scholarship, Marion's Ph.D. dissertation, provides the reader with a window into the genesis of that thought. This translation reproduces the third edition of the French original. Between 1975 and the third edition, Marion's rethinking of the consequences of Descartes's grey ontology produced Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes (forthcoming from St. Augustine's Press).

The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation.

An actology—introduced by the first book in this series, Actology: Action, Change and Diversity in the Western Philosophical Tradition—is a conceptual structure characterized by action, change, and diversity, and that envisages reality as action in changing patterns. The previous book in this series, Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy, reads a number of continental philosophers through this lens. This new book, An Actology of the Given, takes a somewhat different approach: it explores the concepts of the gift, givenness, giving, and other cognates in the light of reality understood as action in patterns rather than as beings that change: and it does so by discussing some anthropology, the writings of a number of continental philosophers, biblical texts, social policy, and a variety of other givens.

The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time. Examining the full range of Descartes' achievements and legacy, it includes 256 in-depth entries that explain key concepts relating to his thought. Cumulatively they uncover interpretative disputes, trace his influences, and explain how his work was received by critics and developed by followers. There are entries on topics such as certainty, cogito ergo sum, doubt, dualism, free will, God, geometry, happiness, human being, knowledge, Meditations on First Philosophy, mind, passion, physics, and virtue, which are written by the largest and most distinguished team of Cartesian scholars ever assembled for a collaborative research project - 92 contributors from ten countries.

This book gives a critical assessment of key developments in contemporary French philosophy, highlighting the diverse ways in which recent French thought has moved beyond the philosophical positions and arguments which have been widely associated with the terms 'post-structuralism' and 'postmodernism'. These developments are assessed through a close comparative reading of the work of seven contemporary thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle. The book situates the writing of each philosopher in relation to earlier traditions of French thought. In differing ways, these philosophers decisively distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which dominated so much twentieth-century thought in order to rethink philosophical conceptions of materiality, worldliness, shared embodied existence and human agency or subjectivity. They thereby open the way for a radical renewal of the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking itself. This book will be an indispensable text for students of philosophy and for anyone interested in current developments in philosophy and social thought.